Deliberation from Within: Changing One's Mind During an Interview

This article examines whether a public opinion survey can improve the quality of political attitudes. More specifically, we argue that simply positioning a summary attitudinal question after a balanced series of relevant items can increase people's ability to answer in a way that better reflects their underlying interests, values, and predispositions. By manipulating the location of the vote preference question in two separate national election campaign surveys, we find that there are fewer undecided respondents when the question is asked at the end of the survey rather than early on, that some people are changing their mind during the questionnaire, that a larger set of determinants is structuring late‐survey vote choice, and that voting preferences based on the later question are a better predictor of the actual vote. The findings carry important lessons for students of deliberation and of citizen decision making.     

The personal life of the behavior analyst

The human species faces crises of critical proportions. Excessive population, global warming, and the anticipated descent from peak fossil-fuel extraction promise to change our future in far-reaching ways. Operant conditioning prepares the individual for a world similar to the selecting past, but our world is changing more rapidly than our adaptation. As individuals, we cannot make substantial changes in the world at large because we do not control enough reinforcers, but we can turn to the sources of our personal behavior and manipulate them. We will need help. Better organized social networks and the self-management techniques they support can promote immediate changes in consumption at home, work, and moving about in our personal worlds. Surprisingly, consuming less can lead to more satisfying and happier lives, but a better understanding of reinforcement contingencies is necessary. We can recover the strengthening effects of personal daily accomplishments that are eroded when conditioned generalized reinforcers intervene. When we get our own personal lives in order we can reduce our carbon footprints, restore the connections between our behavior and its strengthening effects, and become models worthy of imitation.     

Using conditional discrimination training to produce emergent relations between coins and their values in children with autism

The current study evaluated the effects of conditional discrimination (listener) training with coins on the emergence of novel stimulus relations, textual behavior, tacts, and intraverbals. Two preschoolers with autism were taught 3 relations among coins, their names, and values. After initial training, 4 relations emerged for the first participant and 7 for the second participant, suggesting that this technology can be incorporated into educational curricula for teaching prerequisite money skills to children with autism.     

Establishing compliance with liquid medication administration in a child with autism

Children with autism often display difficulty with swallowing pills and liquid medications. In the current study, stimulus fading and positive reinforcement established compliance with liquid medication administration in a young boy with autism. The boy's mother eventually administered liquid medication on her own.     

A comparison of prompting tactics to establish intraverbals in children with autism

We compared the efficacy of tact-to-intraverbal (i.e., using picture prompts) and echoic-to-intraverbal transfer-of-stimulus-control procedures to establish intraverbal responding in 3 boys (4 years old) with autism. For all 3 participants, the picture prompts resulted in fewer trials to criterion, but both prompting tactics were eventually effective.     

Examination of the influence of contingency on changes in reinforcer value

This study examined how the amount of effort required to produce a reinforcer influenced subsequent preference for, and strength of, that reinforcer in 7 individuals with intellectual disabilities. Preference assessments identified four moderately preferred stimuli for each participant, and progressive-ratio (PR) analyses indexed reinforcer strength. Stimuli were then assigned to one of four conditions for 4 weeks: fixed-ratio (FR) 1 schedule, escalating FR schedule, yoked noncontingent (NCR) delivery, and restricted access. Preference assessments and PR schedules were then repeated to examine changes in selection percentages and PR break points. Selection percentages decreased for all NCR stimuli but increased for most of the restricted stimuli. There were no systematic changes in selection percentages for either of the contingent stimuli. Break points increased, on average, for all conditions, but the increase was highest for the restricted stimuli and lowest for the NCR stimuli. These results are discussed in relation to recent basic research addressing the influence of effort on stimulus value.     

Same items, different order: effects of temporal variability on infant categorization

How does variability between members of a category influence infants’ category learning? We explore the impact of the order in which different items are sampled on category formation. Two groups of 10-months-olds were presented with a series of exemplars to be organized into a single category. In a low distance group, the order of presentation minimized the perceptual distance between consecutive exemplars. In a high distance group, the order of presentation maximized the distance between successive exemplars. At test, only infants in the High Distance condition reliably discriminated between the category prototype and an atypical exemplar. Hence, the order in which infants learnt about the exemplars impacted their categorization performance. Our findings demonstrate the importance of moment-to-moment variations in similarity during infants’ category learning.     

Increasing response diversity in children with autism

Repetitive and invariant behavior is a diagnostic feature of autism. We implemented a lag reinforcement schedule to increase response diversity for 6 participants with autism aged 6 to 10 years, 4 of whom also received prompting plus additional training. These procedures appeared to increase the variety of building-block structures, demonstrating that an intervention that includes differential reinforcement can increase response diversity for children with an autism spectrum disorder.     

The effects of constant versus varied reinforcers on preference and resistance to change

Previous research has demonstrated that factors such as reinforcer frequency, amount, and delay have similar effects on resistance to change and preference. In the present study, 4 boys with autism made choices between a constant reinforcer (one that was the same food item every trial) and a varied food reinforcer (one that varied randomly between three possible food items). For all 4 boys, varied reinforcers were preferred over constant reinforcers, and they maintained higher response rates than constant reinforcers. In addition, when a distraction (a video clip) was introduced, responding maintained by varied reinforcers was more resistant to distraction than responding maintained by constant reinforcers. Thus, the present experiment extended the generality of the relation between preference and resistance to change to variation in reinforcer quality.     

Reflexivity in pigeons

A recent theory of pigeons' equivalence-class formation (Urcuioli, 2008) predicts that reflexivity, an untrained ability to match a stimulus to itself, should be observed after training on two "mirror-image" symbolic successive matching tasks plus identity successive matching using some of the symbolic matching stimuli. One group of pigeons was trained in this fashion; a second group was trained similarly but with successive oddity (rather than identity). Subsequently, comparison-response rates on novel matching versus mismatching sequences with the remaining symbolic matching stimuli were measured on nonreinforced probe trials. Higher rates were observed on matching than on mismatching probes in the former group. The opposite effect--higher rates on mismatching than matching probes--was mostly absent in the latter group, despite being predicted by the theory. Nevertheless, the ostensible reflexivity effect observed in former group may be the first time this phenomenon has been demonstrated in any animal.